Extending Insight

["Brandon Diamond" <theevilgeek@gmail.com>]

Hello,

My name is Brandon, and I'm currently an undergraduate CS major at
Brown University. As part of some course improvement work for an OS
class at Brown, I'm looking to build a few GDB extensions to allow
students to explore our kernel more intuitively at "debug-time" (i.e.,
explore the page tables, page directories, system registers [CR3,
CR2], shared pages and so forth). Previously, I had worked with a
partner to convert our toy OS ("Weenix") to run on the Xen hypervisor;
this has allowed us to utilize GDB to debug the kernel. The next step
would be to organize the information GDB gives us into a more useful
view.

In researching this project, I stumbled upon a few screenshots of
Insight-- and boy did it look great! Having multiple floating windows
to fill with assembly, source code, memory, and so on would be a huge
improvement on its own (especially over the TUI)-- if I could write a
plugin to do the extra visualization I had in mind (i.e., displaying
the page tables as a tree, among others) it would be absolutely
perfect.

Alas, it seems that Insight does not come with a plugin interface and
that adding new windows would require a fair amount of C & Tcl. The
good news is that I'm quite familiar with C; the bad news is that I've
never written Tcl before. Thus, it is with a great deal of hope that I
pose the following questions (I'd be extremely grateful for any
pointers or advice any developers on the list might be able to offer!)

 - With a strong background in C and a virtually non-existent background in Tcl,
    - Would it be possible to implement additional windows containing
varied UI components within a reasonable amount of time?
    - Could it be done in 1-3 weeks?
    - Would a working knowledge of TCL suffice, or would I have to go
pro? (if I could get by with minimal knowledge, is there a quick-start
tutorial that you'd recommend?)
    - Is the Insight source & design amenable to these modification--
or would this be a huge undertaking? (i.e., I'd have to read all of
the code to even get started and break a bunch of abstractions in so
doing)

Finally, if Insight is the wrong place for me to start, does anyone
know of a similar project that I might have a better chance of
extending?

Thank you VERY much for your help!

Sincerely,
  Brandon Diamond